The French couple did not speak much English so I rattled on in my best French, thinking I was doing a fine job.

She asked the usual question, how long had we lived in this lovely house? And I assumed she was assuming we were Irish and it had been in our family for generations.

Guests always like to think this and I don’t like to completely disabuse them of it. They’ve come to West Cork for an authentic experience so I massage the Englishness out of the BB and me as best I can, on a customer service basis.

My usual shtick poured forth, therefore, in my best French. And my best French ought not to be too bad. I once lived in France, in a village near Orléans. I was 18 and had fled home at the first opportunity, as young people used to do in those days.

The tragedy of Gary Stevenson

There’s only one reason Meghan went on MasterChef Australia

We should politicise the Berlin Pride attack

I was not able to take up a place at university, because I failed to get into my first choice. Ludicrously enough, I sat the Oxbridge exam from a desk in a school in Coventry thinking that maybe I would be the one person from Coventry that year who they let into Oxford.

I sat in the drama studio and I wrote possibly the worst English lit critical theory essay ever produced, because my hand was stiff........

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